Description of Person The Characteristics of Descriptive Text

meaning, the readers have to focus their eyes and brain to the printed material as they are reading. Meanwhile, According to Richard Allington and Michael Strange reading is an active cognitive process that does indeed require using graphic letters and phonic sounds information. 27 This is in line with what John F Savage and Jean F Mooney stated in their book that reading is a cognitive activity, an activity that involves the use of higher mental process. 28 The cognitive process here means that the reader gets the knowledge from printed material. Cognitive process covers the ability to retell the printed material and intelligence abilities such as implementing the principle or the concept, analyzing, understanding etc. 29 Some linguistics said that a cognitive process is the most important of reading act because the main goal of reading is understanding. Generally, it can be concluded that reading as cognitive process is the process when the reader gets the knowledge from printed material. Furthermore, reading is a complex cognitive process; where the reader comprehends the ideas via medium of text. Reading is the process to understand, to get the knowledge, and to involve reader‟s mind. However, in comprehending a printed language, it is quite difficult for the reader to accomplish multiple things simultaneously in constructing the meaning from a text. Learning to read involves learning to deal with secondary language symbol system. Human invented language to represent or symbolize the objects, experiences, ideas, emotions, etc.Here, Penny Ur explained that: Our aims in real-life reading usually go beyond mere understanding. We may wish to understand something in order to learn from it in a course of study, in order to find out how to act instructions, directions, in order to express an opinion about it a letter requesting advice, or for many other purposes. Other pieces of writing, into which the writer has invested thought and care, demand a personal response from the reader to the ideas in the text, 27 Richard Allington, and Michael Strange, Learning through Reading, Massachusetts: D.C Health, 1990, p.16. 28 John F Savage Jean F Mooney, Teaching Reading to Children with Special Needs, New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1999, p.22. 29 Suharsimi, Arikunto, Dasar-dasar Evaluasi Pendidikan, Jakarta: Bumi Aksara, 2007, pp. 117 — 119. such as interpretation, application to other contexts, criticism, or evaluation. 30 From the definitions given by linguists above, the writer concluded that reading is a process of getting meaning. Reading is not just process of decoding, deciphering, identifying the words but it is a process of getting meaning from the messages or written text and it is a process of transferring the meaning from the writer to the reader.

2. The Purposes of Reading

In the real life, people read and listen to the language because they want to know and grasp the information in written text and because they have a purpose for doing so. According to Rivers and Tempely, they list the following examples of the reason that students may need or want to read because they need: To obtain information for some purposes or because we are curious about some topic, to obtain instruction on how to perform some task for our work or daily life, to keep in touch with friends by correspondence or to understand business letters, to know when o where something will take place or what is available, to know what is happening or has happened as reported in newspaper, magazine, reports, and for enjoyment or excitement. 31 From the explanation above, reading has some purposes to look for the information in many kinds of printed materials. In addition, reading for pleasure is considered as for enjoyment activities. In this sense, the readers read the text to get the knowledge. It means that they learn something from a text. Actually, it needs abilities to remember the main idea, recognize and build rhetorical in the text, and correlate the prior knowledge to the text that has been read. Another linguist such as Jeremy Harmer, he divided the reasons why people like to read and to listen. Those are categorized into two broad areas: First is, Instrumental; where people want to get some clear aim. 32 It means that a large amount of the reader integrate all the information that be found in the text to get 30 Penny Ur, A Course in Language Teaching; Practice and Theory, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 150. 31 Jo McDonough and Christopher Shaw, Material and Method in ELT; Teacher’s Guide, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993, pp. 102 —103. 32 Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, 1990 p. 200.